Also in our company we practise to be ready against earthquakes or fire..today we experimented a general evacuation, together with a demonstration from the YCFB, Yokohama City Fire Bureau, on how to use a fire estingusher and an hydrant. The attenders were given a survival kit made of food, in case of real emergency.

Beginning Tuesday, November 20, all foreign nationals entering/re-entering Japan will be fingerprinted and photographed each time they go through Immigration Control. This new system applies to all foreigners, regardless of resident status, except for persons in the categories listed below. If you refuse this procedure, you will not be allowed to enter the country.

Here we are. New episode of Lifestyle. In this new one, a very Japanese topic. I'll tell you about the MANGA, comics, which the Japanese of all ages get crazy for.There are manga and manga. There are the ones on war themes, where the stories of the samurai and his fellows, who prefer to commit harakiri rather then lose the battle, are narrated; there are the ones where the protagonist is a half-naked lady warrior, very martial arts and curves; there are also the ones with porn themes, very legal and provoking no scandal; there are the ones, as my Italian friend Serena who studies manga says, where the story has no meaning; there are the brain-squeezing ones; there are the very heroic ones....Once the manga was , especially during the war, a means to spread political ideals and view among the soldiers,then it became the way to escape reality, when the TV and the ANIME, short for 'animation', when videogames and internet were only in the imagination of some future-oriented people. By the time, comics, in opposition to what happened in the rest of the wester world, had become more and more diffused, and nowadays you can see everywhere people reading fastly the colored or black and white pages of the comics......on trains, into bars, there are even placec called MANGA KISSA, coffee bar for manga, whre the youth usually go in case the lost the last train....in those places now it's also possible to eat and drink all night, and read manga, of course. The events with a manga theme are assaulted, the "fathers" of the characters are considered as gods.In Japan, a word describes the anime fanatics: OTAKU, word that now also assumed a more general meaning of fanatic.What does of a manga a case study is the impact the comic's reality has on the man's imagination: besides the cartoons that come from the manga,besides the hurry of the readers who want to reach soon the end of the book (very often bigger than the books of harry potter stories) , besides the miniatures reproducing the inked heroes and the heroines, besides all of this, the projection of that reality into the real worls is what astonishes and highlights disease.Indeed, not rare to see boys and girls wearing the costumes of their favourite characters, as if thei can find the key to reveal theiselves and their inner nature, as if in initating the heroes,their personality manifests itself and the propension to find the perfection in costumes reflects the Japanese tendency to the reproduction of an unique original in multiple copies.

As is typical in most cultures, many Japanese customs and manners are a result of superstitions or the continuation of traditional beliefs into modern life.

The Japanese word for death (shi) is pronounced the same as the number four, and the word for trouble, difficulty, KU, sounds the same as the number nine. So, in some hotels and hospitals you won't find rooms numbered 4 or 9. For the same reason, don't give things in multilpe of four: dish sets and presents usually come in multiples of five.

Don't sleep with your head pointing to the north: that is the way the deceased are laid.

When addressing an envelope to someone, do not write their name in red ink, since this is also a custom associated with funerals.

Other prohibitions include not walking on the border of tatami mats, eating eel and melon in the same meal, or cutting your fingernails at night.

One thing of the Japanese impresses: they're always around. And they're many. Very many. From early in the morning you can see them massive heading to the train or metro stations, or to the buses that will take them to their workplaces.They are not the only ones. As many as them, there's a whole of people who walk to the workplace. And you can see a river of humans in motion, a unique body that fluidly and thickly moves noisly along the sidewalks or crosses the streets, maybe while running because the traffic light is getting red....If someone would cross such a barrier of unflagging pedestrians, to turn left or righ from the direction kept by the group, then he'll have to thrust....same thing, or even worse, when he wants to walk upstream!!!The phenomenon of the folk on foot is not something related to the early hours, at every hour indeed it is possible to admire and wonder so much abundancy of two-leggeds spread along the streets...And up to late at night they keep living at full blast. Not rare, indeed, to find oneself bubbleing along the semi-deserted streets, where here semi-deserted means that nobody is hurting you,very late at night, and seeing still active men and women weighted down by bags, shopping bags and all they could do in the few hours between having dinner and going back home, who don't care that it's almost wake up time again....

They know here in Japan how to use space at best....here, where only in the big Tokyo about 30 million people have home, and where more people work, it's understandable how important optimizing space is - an essential resource, the space. And here they are, the urban geniuses start thinking to some ideas and they invent the underworld, they make vacuum where soil, matter were, and then they refill this vacuum....

first it was the subway passageways: along the passage connecting one line to another, or one line to the closest exit to the surface, you see restaurants, shops, bakeries, coffee shops, and so on, for the complete satisfaction of the daily commuters.

Then it was also the surroundng areas: everything becomes subway, everything is put at the underground level, and several objectives are reached altogether......removing people from the crowded streets, using space horizontally, having a wider modulable surface, and finally having HUGE SPACES, yes, you should know that this world underworld is of unimaginable proportions, a city under the city, a business centre continuously expanding itsself and continuously competing agains the cousins commercial centers pointing to the sky.

One more episode of the series Lyfestyle. This time the places of perdition.Look for the noisest place in the neighborhood, and you'll probably find yourself standing in front of a PACHINKO. Outside a triumph of colored lights that make a caleidoscope of neons, notable even in full daylight. Just stepping into is an adrenaline rush.the sliding doors open, you're hit by a wave of sounds and loud noises, and often also by a thick cloud of smoke, not deeper even in London, and long series of slot machines appear, they being taken by professional or unexperienced players, men and women, yes, even women, ready to give away their finances into a game that, statistics in hand, don't pays....

The game typically involves flipping steel balls inside an upright slot machine; the balls bounce off pins and other obstructions on their way down, and if one or more balls enter holes you receive a payout of.....more balls!

Queues at the entrances from early in the morning to break into and get the seats closer to the doors - apparently those giving more chances to win - are very terrific.